Against expertise, or unforbidden recapitulations in Frame’s short fiction

Frame’s short stories are full of the failure of experts, but where these figures of authority are shown to be wrong or are rendered conspicuously absent, the terms and laws of their symbolic systems persist. The experts may suffer capitulation, but other characters are quick to re-capitulate their authority in ways that suggest almost everything said in a Frame story comes with quotation marks. Capitulation may describe an agreement or contract by which to consider again Frame’s relationship to authority (her own, and that of others), it may draw attention to the problem of expertise and critical evaluation (as discussed by Michael Clune in his A Defence of Judgment ) in her work, but it might also offer a way of reading Frame’s engagement with the short story form itself. As I hope to show, Frame’s short stories constantly draw attention to the problem of expertise, which is to say, to the ways in which the settler societies she so often depicts repeat a conservative and colonial social context contracted to a particular kind of authority.